Wednesday, January 21, 2004

How shortsighted and selective are Iraq critics

Airline communities throughout the country, including Fayette County, are home to the only people left in the U.S., besides the thousands of relatives of the victims of 9/11 in New York, and our military communities, that remember what happened on that awful day, and above all, are still waging the war that our President declared on terrorism.

I must admit that calling the struggle against terrorism a “war” leaves me wondering, because there are still so many folks living in this country that waged a brutal and devastating war from 1941-1945, initiated by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That wonderful generation of men and women probably talk quietly among themselves, lamenting this self-absorbed baby-boomer generation’s use of the word “war.” Indeed, if our parents were in charge, I doubt if Bill Clinton would have been elected to humiliate and embarrass America, for two terms, and leave unpunished the earlier attack on the WTC in 1993. If they were still in charge, Saudi Arabia and some other middle eastern real estate might look like the pictures coming back from the surface of Mars.

World War II was a lesson from our parents on how to preserve the safety and order of our own United States of America, our home, our society. All stops were pulled out, and the Germans and Japanese were pummeled into their own dirt, face down, never to return to whatever “glory” they think they had.

I sometimes wonder if the election of 2000 was not one of the only modern-day interventions by God witnessed by the entire planet. Is it only logical to speculate on the incompetent, wimpy and apologetic behavior of Al Gore and whatever administration he would have put together, should he had been the President on that day in September of 2001?

We now face what I think could be a devastating election for 2004. Blind hatred for our President, in the face of three years of no attacks on our soil, runs unabated outside the borders of Fayette County. Many of us, in order to work every day and coexist with our memory-impaired coworkers, will simply have to not speak of politics, or consider relocation to Canada.

There is a museum in Peachtree City, at the airport, and it is a memorial to WWII. The elderly, dignified and polite men that lecture there will tell you a story or two about a war that many of them fought in, most of them teenagers way back then, leaping into the cockpits of P-51s, B-17s, Thunderbolts, clear in their minds that this flight may be their last, clear in their minds the faces of teenagers they knew who simply disappeared during a mission.

I have no idea how or where they got their courage to step into those combat aircraft, to step off those landing craft, to face off across the sea with massive guns. I hope I can glean a modicum of that courage to face the caterwauling of the coming election.

G. Baldwin

Peachtree City, Ga.